The Haunting of Alma Fielding by Kate Summerscale, review: Britain's strange passion for the paranormal

In the period after the First World War, as mothers and widows attempted to reach slaughtered loved ones, Ouija boards, table-rapping, like jiggery-pokery, was big business, with seminars and jamborees offered by the London Spiritual Alliance, the Society for Psychical Research, the Institute of Experimental Metaphysics, the British College of Psychic Science and the International Institute for Psychical Research, which had its headquarters behind Harrods.

In these faux academic precincts, messages from the dead could be collected in “spherical receptors” – patented apparatus like the Reflectograph or the Communigraph – and usefully tapped out in morse code. As Kate Summerscale puts it, darkened seance rooms, “mystical, tactile, erotically charged,” offered “a sense of wonder and intimacy rarely found in the Church of England”. I can well believe it.

Though Summerscale keeps a straight face, it does all sound like the music hall: ventriloquial voices, flowers blooming from women’s corsets, the 18-stone chap who “claimed he could levitate”. Arthur Conan Doyle called it the “breaking down of the walls between two worlds” – and after that, all manner of nutcase was given credence: the lady whose face could be made to resemble that of a wizened Chinaman or “a Zulu warrior with a ring in his nose”; the ex-soldier who, though blind, could cycle around London avoiding collisions with pillar boxes and men in kilts; the talking mongoose on the Isle of Man, “in the Irish Sea” (so that’s where it is); and the ghost horse that galloped around Deal.

Much of this was the work of “scoundrels and liars”, of course. A woman who in a trance relayed private information was found to have been employed on a telephone switchboard, where she’d eavesdropped on confidential conversations. Alleged mediums managed their tricks with wires and pulleys. Objects plucked from thin air had been hidden up the nose or behind false teeth.

Summerscale’s Van Helsing, the man charged with exposing fraud in the hope of locating genuine poltergeist mischief, was Nandor Fodor, who often stayed overnight in haunted houses, “surrounded by cameras, flashbulbs, switches and timers.” In 1938, he became interested in Alma Fielding, from Croydon – a nervous wreck, always “trembling and burning,” insomniacal, “frail and hollow-eyed,” who’d had kidney complaints and a breast lopped off.

She was a danger to be around, as glasses and plates flew about, coins cascaded from the ceiling, kitchen appliances did a dance: “The house seemed to be under siege from itself.” On an average morning, such was Alma’s “spontaneous discharge of electrical energy,” the noisy spirit with which she was possessed smashed 36 tumblers, 24 wine glasses, 15 china egg cups and dented a kettle.

Fodor couldn’t wait to present Alma to his colleagues at the Institute, where her shoes disappeared, then her hat. Her skin was raked by claws, as if an invisible tiger was present. Pictures moved on the walls, “propelled by an unseen force”. Alma, who returned to the podium week after week to have her astral planes examined, seemed “a genuine and amazing case of the supernatural”. Fodor, indeed, was so enchanted, he had to go on holiday to Brittany, “on the north coast of France” (so that’s where it is) to have a breather, but it all disintegrated when he returned with an X-ray machine.

Alma, it transpired, had hidden objects and trinkets in her corsets and “the elastic around a knicker leg”. She’d also made use of her bodily cavities, her chief place of concealment being her front bottom. Her falls, faints and shudders disguised her actions – what magicians call misdirection – and Fodor was astounded by Alma’s “quite unusual muscular agility”, which enabled her to “pull several items out of herself at once”. It certainly beats a top hat. Chucking crockery everywhere was another way of creating confusion – and all this at a time, says Summerscale (who seems to want an epic canvas), when “German troops were gathering near the Czech border”.

Instead of dismissing Alma as an ingenious hoaxer, however, Fodor wanted to look deeper into her motivations. His theory was that her apparent supernatural powers had bubbled up from the subconscious, as a function of mental breakdown, “a rush of fearful associations”. Freud, after all, had been telling people about neuroses, fixations, inhibitions and inferiority complexes, introducing the idea that “individuals contain secret worlds, hidden from themselves”. (Hardly news to novelists.)

Alma, upon further investigation, had been abused as a child, and when first married “had cried hysterically and fainted” if her husband wished to have sex. She was clearly intensely troubled, even going in for “psychic shoplifting” when brooches pinched from Woolworth’s suddenly appeared on her lapel. In Summerscale’s eccentric view of cause and effect, the upshot of this pilfering was that “Adolf Hitler had massed 80,000 troops on the Austrian border”.

What a peculiar, shuffled book this is. Though based on archival transcripts, notes and photographs, it is as preposterous as fiction. As non-fiction, it lacks scepticism. When Summerscale says Alma’s case demonstrates how “repressed traumatic experiences could generate terrifying physical events” and that “the poltergeist was her surrogate”, are we meant to assume our author goes along with an ultimate belief in supernatural phenomena? Not even Fodor could explain away how Alma’s wardrobe kept falling over or why her doormat wrapped itself around a policeman’s head.

Alma died in 1976, shunned for “her smell, her colostomy bag and her sloppy cooking habits”. She reminded people of Irene Handl, “the comic actress”. So that’s who Irene Handl was.

Inside this gallimaufry, nevertheless, an interesting cultural history is struggling to emerge – the story of how, between the wars, the world was “cracking and collapsing” under everyone’s feet – and this was implied and expounded in everything from cubist art, T S Eliot’s poems, Surrealism (Magritte wanted “to show everyday objects in situations in which we never encountered them”), Hollywood horror movies about vampires and Daphne du Maurier novels to psychoanalysis, theories of quantum mechanics and the postulation of subatomic particles – all of this suggesting life’s “jarring dislocations” and that, at bottom, there is no such thing as solidity.

To order a copy of The Haunting of Alma Fielding by Kate Summerscale for ￡16.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books